have nothing to do with me whatever." The saints, the saints! She envies them, of course. But they are so dowdy. The sinners are so much more agreeable. And the ways of this world are pleasant, pleasant. Dark thoughts, dark hours will intrude, will overcome us like a summer cloud, and then we get out Pascal or Nicole and hurry to the altar. Yes, she is mean and low and base, she says. When she sees people too happy it fills her with despair, which is not the fashion of a beautiful soul. She is not a beautiful soul, calls herself a soul of mud. How can any prayer, or any religion, or any God save her?

She has her moments, also, not of defiance, but of question whether it is worth while to make oneself unhappy. You must love my weaknesses, my faults," she says. "For my part, I put up with them well enough." After all, if she is lukewarm, and easy-going, and forgetful, so are others, millions of others. Why should she suffer for it more than they? "We practice salvation with the saints," she says, "and damnation with the children of this world." "We are not the devil's," she says, "because we fear God and because at bottom we have a touch of religion. We are not God's, either, because His law is hard and we do not wish to do ourselves a damage. This is the state of the lukewarm, and the great number of them does not distress me. I enter perfectly into their reasons. At the same time, God hates them and they ought to escape from their condition; but this is precisely the difficulty."

No one has portrayed more exquisitely than she the pitiful but human lightness of common souls in face of these enormous questions. "My saintly friend sometimes finds me as reasonable and serious as she would have me. And then a whiff of spring air, a ray of sunshine, sweeps away all the reflections of the twilight gloom." And it is she who framed the advice, dangerous or precious according to the heart it falls on, Il faut glisser sur les pensées et ne pas les aprofondir. (It is sometimes best to slip over thoughts and not go to the bottom of them.)

So we have seen Madame de Sévigné to be in every respect a sweetly rounded nature, one of the most so, one of the most sane, normal, human women that have left the record of their souls for the careful study of posterity. Well, in this pure and perfect

pliment which the eager listener can set down and pass on. Like a lover of twenty, she suggests that she and her beloved are looking at the moon at the same hour. "You alone," she writes, in the ardor of her passion, "can make the joy or the sorrow of my life. I know nothing but you, and beyond you everything is nothing to me." Over and over again she repeats that she wishes she loved God as she loves this bit of herself, this thing of mortal, but exquisite fragility. Now that is not quite the tone of a common, sane, and normal mother, is it?

And the daughter, did she deserve it? Most think not. Saint-Simon, who charmingly eulogized the mother by saying that her wit was so sympathetic that it bred wit in those she talked with, speaks of Madame de Grignan very differently. "In spite of all that Madame de Sévigné says in her letters," he writes, "she died very little regretted by her husband, her family, or her neighbors." Beautiful she undeniably was. Also she was a scholar, a pupil of Descartes, a reader of philosophies, and critic of literature, who looked down a little on her mother's naïve and extremely personal judgments. She was a wit, wrote what she thought fine letters. They seem to us a little stilted, as the one she sent to Moulceau after her mother's death. And some say she was without her mother's broad sympathy and apt to be passionate and quarrelsome.

But all these things were nothing to the mother lover. It is, indeed, pretty to observe how, being the keenest-sighted of women, she occasionally sees things that she will not see. Thus, she writes of her daughter's boasted style, "It is perfect. All you have to do is to keep it as it is and not try to improve it." Or, of the daughter's attitude towards herself: "Somebody said the other day that, with all the tender affection you have for me, you don't get as much out of my society as you might, that you do not appreciate what I am worth, even as regards you."

For the most part, however, it is a sweet, warm tempest of praise, an indigestion of praise, touchingly at variance with the chilly judgment of those who looked on. Madame de Grignan has not only the choicest of intellects, but the tenderest of hearts. She has a stoical, old Roman virtue, which the vulgar may mistake for indifference; but underneath she is so sur

things actually done or said while the lover and the beloved were together. But we have the piteous cry of the bereaved one when they had felt themselves compelled to part. "Was it a crime for me to be anxious about your health? I saw you perishing before my eyes, and I was not permitted to shed a tear. I was killing you, they said, I was murdering you. I must keep still, if I suffocated. I never knew a more ingenious and cruel torment." Or again: "In God's name, child, let us try another visit to reëstablish our reputation. We must be more reasonable, at least you must, and not give them occasion to say, 'You simply kill one another.'" With what a strangled clutch does she tear at her heart, in the effort to make those adjustments of human passion which can never be perfectly made by flesh and blood. "You speak like one who is even further from me than I thought; who has wholly forgotten me, who no longer understands the measure of my attachment, nor the tenderness of my heart, who knows no longer the devotion I have for her, nor that natural weakness and bent to tears which have been an object of mocking to your philosophic firmness."

But it makes no difference. In spite of presence, or absence, or indifference, the old wound keeps still and always fresh and bleeding. Still, still the longing heart cries out for what it needs, even if it can never obtain it: "How is it that my whole life turns on one sole thought and everything else appears to me to be nothing?" Only God can comfort her. "Everything must be given up for God, and I will do it, and will only wonder at His ways, who, when all things seem as if they should be well with us, opens great gulfs which swallow the whole good of life, a separation which wounds my heart every hour of the day and far more hours of the night than sense or reason would." Thus, you see, this sweet and noble lady, whose robust strength it seems as if we might all envy, also carried her burden of spiritual grief. Assuredly she is the more charming for it. As she herself said: "In the midst of all my moralizing, I keep a good share of the frailty of humanity." Thank God, she did.

Wellesley Hills, Mass.

GAMALIEL BRADFORD.